Refugees are the keenest dialecticians. They are refugees as a
result of changes and their sole object of study is change.

—Bertolt Brecht

Refugees study change not only because they’ve been put through
changes but also because changes are what they want and what they
play and what they are. Refugees study a mode of study—the
contrapuntal intersection of a set of interstitial fields,
dislocation in a hole or a hold or a whole or a crawlspace. Such
study is inhabitation that moves: by way of—but also
in apposition to—injury, which is irreducible in the refugee though
she is irreducible to it. There is, in turn, passage in
acknowledging the theoretical practice of the one who emerges as if
from nowhere, rooted in having been routed, digging, tilling,
working, sounding, the memorial future of a grave, undercommon
cell. She is the commodity, the impossible domestic, the
interdicted/contradictive mother. Dangerously embedded in the home
from which she is excluded, she is more and less than one. The
question of where and when she enters—where entrance is reduced to
some necessarily tepid mixture of naturalization and coronation,
which is an already failed solution that is ever more emphatically
diluted in its abstract and infinite replication—is always shaded
by the option to refuse what has been refused, by the preferential
option not for a place but rather for radical displacement, not for
the same but for its change. Blackness is given in the
refusal2 of the refugee.

Cosmopolitanism has more often than not been thought to be an
overview of the underground to which blackness is supposed to have
been relegated. Overseeing and overlooking are crucial elements of
this particular interplay of blindness and insight. The necessary
detachment that links and animates these elements becomes even more
important as the various officially sanctioned modes of
Euro-American cosmopolitanisms, and their Afro-diasporic critical
variants, emerge. Perhaps detachment within that diverse set of
cosmopolitanist theories is necessary to the illumination of the
federated universality of a cosmopolitan drive. Detachment helps to
enact a kind of meta-cosmopolitanism to the extent that it
redoubles a certain constitution of cosmopolitanism as the “womb in
which all original predispositions of the human species will be
developed,” a tendency whose subjunctivity persists as we await
“the achievement of a civil society universally administering
right,” whose own precondition is “a lawful external relation
between states.” Immanuel Kant tries to tell us why we have to wait
for what he calls cosmopolitanism, noting that the safety and
sanctity of this womb and its generative capacity is always
threatened with deferral by states; and Gilles
Deleuze, reading himself into and out of Kant’s conceptual
framework, cautions us against state thought such as the
paradoxically static and statist conceptions of cosmopolitanism
that turn out to ground and sanction those antagonistic external
relations that Kant posits both as a natural order and as that
which nature drives peoples to transcend. Are lawful external
relations between states just as dangerous to the universal
administration of right as their unlawful counterparts? What if
cosmopolitanism, which is, of necessity, national is, precisely
because of this necessity, its own most absolute and eternal
deferral? What if cosmopolitanism is not just national, but also
racial, as well. Consider that both lawful and unlawful relations
between states operate, as it were, in the medium of
statelessness—which is also to say upon stateless flesh or, both
more generally and more precisely, earthly materiality that is
posited as unembodied and figured as unanimated. Racialized and
sexualized, but also given in the general distinction between man
and dominion, statelessness is interdicted
materiality. This is to say that statelessness ought
not in any case be seen simply as the field marked out by the
difference between the citizen and the noncitizen. On the one hand,
statelessness is the field of their convergence and coalescence and
its modern determination and adjudication (even and especially as
what can rightly and all but generally be called the lived
statelessness of the citizen) is enacted in and by
ascriptions and impositions of state-sanctioned or naturalized
difference; on the other hand, and in the first place...

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